"Moving Upmarket: Plan Early for the Enterprise" with Workiva's CEO Julie Iskow

Jacobson partner at Norwest Venture Partners. Sean, Boom. It is so good to be here with you on stage. Like we're working together. But actually, what was the last time we worked together at a company, at a SaaS company? If you remember, it was about 15 years ago. Believe it or not, 2006, we were together and it was a little startup and it was right here in San Mateo, not far from here at all. Right. That's where we were. That's when we worked together a long time ago. Look where we are today. Speaking of today, do we have the best topic at saster? Growing, scaling into the enterprise. That's what it's all about, growth. It is the quintessential topic for Saster, the essence of why we're really all here.

Well, Julie, absolutely. It's one of the most important topics for our SaaS companies at Norwest and.

For every SAS company I've been working with too. I guess we, we both live this day in and day out, different contexts, but all about what we do. And I'm going to let you take the stage. I'm going to shoot back and I'll be back.

All right, thank you. I'm Sean Jacobson, partner at Norwest Venture Partners where I focus on business applications. Prior to Norwest, I worked at a few SaaS companies. Cornerstone On Demand, Wageworks and Upwork. 16 of the 18 companies I worked at or invested in started down market. And in Marc Benioff's book, he says 80% of companies start down down market. But very often companies take too long to plan their upmarket journey and fail on the upmarket path. And this inspired me to create a failure museum at home. I realized that you can learn just as much from success as failure. I have over 200 items in my museum of failed companies and failed products. You can see all the items and the reason for failure at my website, Failure museum. As you see in the picture, I'm wearing my Theranos lab coat. I've got a Webvan IPO bottle from its IPO date 1999, still unopened. And then I'm holding my pets.com sock puppet. People often say, Sean, why move up market? Well, Legion, one of my portfolio companies, an HR platform for hourly workers, started their life as a mid market player. And then we saw a land grab opportunity in the enterprise to display some SaaS 1.0 and on premise solutions. And that led us to bring on some really strong logos that have helped pave a great path for us in the enterprise. In the enterprise Best in class retention is 95% and in the mid market it's 85%. That 10% difference in retention can be significant on your path to growth. Now, Salesforce in the early days started really far down market. They had 6% a month logo churn. 6% a month logo churn. That's 72% annualized churn. If they didn't move up market as quickly as they did, we wouldn't know Salesforce as they are today. The TAM in the enterprise is as big, if not bigger than the mid market. So in fundraising and for your eventual outcome, you'll have a much bigger success story if you go after a bigger tam. At Wageworks, one of our early customers was Wells Fargo. By getting Wells Fargo early, that really helped us run the table in the financial services industry. And it's much easier to grow faster with fewer larger deals. But one of my portfolio companies got stuck down market too long. They failed in their upmarket journey and they could no longer stay as a standalone business. Moving up market is a multiple dimensional problem, which is why I'm going to go through these four areas with you guys right now. At Cornerstone, one of our early customers was Barclays. That person got promoted. They also became a thought leader in the industry. So when you're making your first enterprise sales, look for decision makers that have a similar kind of motivation. It's seven times easier to sell to a new existing customer than find a new customer. So propel one of my portfolio companies in the product life cycle management space. They do a great job of landing in geographies and departments and expanding from there. Don't get no from someone who can't say yes. A lot of my portfolio companies say that. Well enable in the rebate management space says this all the time. If they can't get a C level person on their side to meet a C level person on the potential customer side early in the sales cycle, they often will disqualify the deal. You know, I made this problem once in a home project. If you know that procurement is going to be involved later in the cycle, don't negotiate price with your buyer because procurement gets paid on lowering the price later. And we said this all the time at Cornerstone. Hit your plan with the mid market and crush it with the enterprise. So most people probably don't believe this statement. But what really matters is revenue. It's so easy to over inflate your pipeline. But most enterprises, they start in departments and geographies and they heavily negotiate the deal. What you really need to do is focus on revenue. How many football fans here? How many people are excited to see the season start yesterday? Well, I was. What a great game. How about 49er fans? I'm a big 49er fan. This is gonna be the first year I go to every game. I've been a season ticket holder for 12 years. But when I think about enterprise selling, I think about it as a football analogy. You have a football team that's orchestrating plays with the other football team. And love in the analyst community is so important in enterprise selling. Workato one of my portfolio companies in the enterprise integration space, they sent 20 of their most important customer references to Gartner and they were the first startup in 20 years to debut in the leader quadrant. And even to today they keep sending Gartner customer references so they can stay in the upper right hand quadrant. Punch above your weight class. Enable does this as well. And a lot of my other companies is they bring companies that are much larger than them to surround them. So at Enable's customer conference they had a president of Schneider Electric speak and people later said that conference is the world cup of rebate management. Spiff in the sales commission space, they wanted to greatly increase their pipeline. So one way they did that is every month they provide their top list of target accounts to their customers. I mean to their other company, their partners, their board. And that has really helped them with their pipeline. Don't give your customers a 1-800-call-Me number. Your top executives need to have as many as 20 accounts that have their personal phone number. In the first year of your customer engagement, you should be calling your customer at least twice a week. You should not be celebrating success. Once implementation happens, don't spike the ball and do your touchdown dance. What really matters is sustained success over a period of time. Demand based. And the account based marketing space wanted to significantly increase the number of references and case studies they have. So they do ROI studies with every one of their customers. And a customer advisory board is so important they can help influence your product roadmap. They can help each other in implementation and with best practices. I would argue that a couple of my products in my failure museum are examples of companies that maybe didn't use a customer advisory board. So for some reason BIC thought women needed their own pencil and for some reason Harley Davidson sold cologne. So you should not create a custom product for your customers. Provis one of my portfolio companies in the services quoting space asks their customers for three times why they need certain functionality and I'm mentioning point Two, again, very similar to number one, snowflakes and blue buttons. They're both super unique. You want to create repeatable product for your customers. And when identifying your product gaps, identify what is table stakes and what's aspirational and focus on what is table stakes. The roadmap is so critically important and your enterprise customers are going to know that they can grow with you over time. You should not avoid the cio. Salesforce in the early days avoided the CIO and realized that was a big problem because they're always integrally involved in some of the most important sales cycles. So they hired a CIO where 50% of their time that CIO is the CIO for Salesforce and the other 50% of the time they're selling to CIOs. So I really enjoyed sharing some of my learnings around sales, marketing, customer success and product. It's now my pleasure to introduce you to Julie Iskow, CEO of Workiva. We had the pleasure of working together at Wageworks and she has taken a couple companies from the tens of millions of revenue to the hundreds of millions of revenue. Julie, please come up.

Hello. Thank you.

Sean and Julie, question for you. So how was wageworks able to be so successful so early on selling to the enterprise?

It sounds easy the way you say it, but it is because we were planning, because we were intentional, because we were deliberate and because we worked our ass off. That's why it was hard work. But we did get in, we got those customers and we expanded and grew those accounts. But it is not, is absolutely not an easy task. But great. Thank you very much, Sean.

Julie.

Okay. Sean just mentioned to you that I have been at companies that have scaled from the tens of millions to the hundreds of millions. And he's right. And I also happen to have been at companies gone into companies at the 300 million mark twice. So I've not only lived the scale in going from small mid market into the enterprise and seeing what succeeded and what failed, but I've also gone in at these multi hundred million dollar companies already in the enterprise and seen how life could be different in the enterprise had things been done differently early on, before and on the way up to the enterprise. Now the one thing to keep in mind and what I have learned is it's not just about the path to the enterprise, not just getting there, it's just not planning and getting there. It's. It's being ready when you're there, it's thriving when you're there. That's what means to be in the enterprise, when you can stay, when you've got referenceable customers and you're renewing and that's when things like this happen. The successful exits. Incredible opportunity, incredible challenge. Listen to this. 88% of the Fortune 100, 85% of the Fortune 500, 80% of the Fortune 1000. That's the customer base of the company I am in right now. It's an enviable list of clients. Its strong and phenomenal customer base. These customers though, they're not just logos. They're not just logos I'm going to stick on the website. They're strategic customers. That means we get to grow with them when they grow and more importantly they grow with us when we grow. It's all about enterprise. That is what it means to be in the enterprise. And this getting here, it's hard. It's hard work. These enterprise customers can be brutal. They can be brutal. They're demanding. They use your products like they've never been used before. They go to the boundaries, they have unique processes and workflows. It is hard. They push you, they challenge you, but they also inspire you. They also make you better. And they make you better not just for them, but they make you better for all the customers in the enterprise. Those customers that you want to be in your customer base. So keep that in mind where they're going to push you. This is not an easy job. If you're willing to do what it takes though, if you actually are willing to do the work to get in there, you can reap the rewards of this. And Sean mentioned what they are, I mean much, much more predictable. Lots of less churn, more revenue, more bookings, significant opportunity for growth. But you have to be willing to, to do what it takes to get there. It is not easy. You hear all around here, here's how I went, here's how I did it. But it's hard work, gotta be on it continuously. And the thing again, it doesn't end when you get there. I still, we still, we live it every day. We work hard every day to get those referenceable customers, to keep those customers happy, to keep those multi year contracts renewing. You want to delight them always and you gotta keep doing it. So it's the journey doesn't end. But the one thing what happens is you develop the muscle. You start doing the right things in your company. You've hired the right people. It's the way you operate. That's the model you are now. It's a different model than where you are when you are in SMB and mid market. So it does get easier, but you still work at it and you still live it every day. So both from taking the journey up and then walking in once the journey's complete. I'm going to talk to you about some actions that you can take today before you go up market. And it's both to improve your chances of getting there and winning, but also to reduce the burden of it because it's so hard. When you make the move, the first thing, know where you're going and make it visible. Sounds like leadership 101 and good hygiene, doesn't it? And it is. When you decide you're gonna go to the enterprise and you know that's where you're gonna be, say it, talk about it, define it, make it really, really clear that that's the direction you're going in. You going to San Mateo, you going to New York City or you're going to go to the moon. And everyone around you needs to know that. Everyone in your company needs to know where you're going. And it's true anywhere. Even for Workiva Today at a 600 million dollar public company, our team doesn't talk about the 600 million, we talk about the billion. We, we're going. And the reason it's so important, the reason it's so important is because you want everyone in the company start thinking about that when they make decisions. They're not going to be thinking about today, they're going to be thinking about, they're going to be thinking about what it's going to look like a couple of years from now. And the decisions they make today are going to incorporate that into their mindset. You got to get an informed multi year strategy. The operative word there is informed. You have to know what it's going to look like up there, what those customers are going to want from you. We'll talk a little bit more about how you do that. But once you know where you're going directionally, say it and then align the people and align the teams. And the one important topic here is going into the enterprise is a team sport. This is not about building a product and it's not about getting your sales team out there selling enterprise deals. Everyone in the company has to be in, they all have to know where you're going. You've got to communicate it ad nauseam, talk about it all the time. This is where we're going. I want to tell you quickly that when I was in one of those prior companies, we had a great customer potential Customer on the hook. We got in the door. They liked what they saw, but they wanted to learn more. They wanted to make sure we could satisfy them before they sign on the dotted line. It was months of getting this customer. Months. And we spent weeks and weeks with this customer going through their requirements, going through their workflows, going through their user experience, making sure that we could build what they needed, making sure what we had was good enough. It was. I used the word brutal again. Unbelievable. We were all so enthusiastic, we were all so excited. There were sales in the room, there was product in the room, there was engineering in the room, there was sales architecture. That was the group. And guess what we got there. We aligned our roadmaps, we said what we would do in the future. And then it came time to get this thing signed. And then it came at us. You can't believe the terms and the terms they wanted us to sign, the pricing, the agreements, Unbelievable scrutiny on the data security and privacy and all these things. Soc 2 and ISO20001, I mean, boom, boom, boom. And at that time we hadn't been talking about the goal and the objective. People's minds weren't open to this. They didn't have the mindset of the enterprise, like, wait, what we don't. They didn't understand that that's where we're going. And we needed to do that. We didn't have legal there to be able to process all of this, negotiate. They wanted it on their paper. We weren't ready. We were not ready for this monster. And much of it, sales was product, was the groups that were there negotiating, but not the rest of the company. And it's something that the company needs to be thinking about. We did end up getting that customer. And I will tell you this, it was hard and it was a morale downer for a lot of people. It took a big adjustment and it took a lot of resources outside of what we had originally anticipated. So mindset is critically important. And when you're in the enterprise mindset and when your team is in the enterprise mindset, you start making decisions with that in mind. You're going to be making a lot of decisions and you're making them for today because you got to meet quota quarter after quarter and you're making decisions on how to be strong in your mid market. Sean said, win in the mid market, you got to be great. So you're going to be making a lot of decisions. Well, if you can make a decision that's good for the mid market and being upmarket that's what you want. Keep it in mind. I'm not saying you need to turn your organization around and start building for the enterprise immediately. But decisions need to be made today that are going to impact you tomorrow and make your life a lot easier. Listed some of them here. I mean when you're building your product, you know those customers in the enterprise are going to need configurability and flexibility. You know this. That's not necessarily the case. The SMB and the mid market. So the default could be for the mid market. But build in the flexibility as you build your platform. Otherwise you're going to be redoing things when you get up there. Integrations, you know, you need to be open. Those big customers have an ecosystem of applications and platforms and data sources. You need to be ready for that. Build it while you're building can give you unlimited list of things that the companies that I've been with wish they could have done. If they only had the mindset and knew where they were going and what it was going to be like when they got there, things would have been built a lot differently. The platform, Think platform. Not many companies go up market with a single solution. Be thinking about what you're going to be building on your platform next. And when you build your platform, build the services consumable so that when you do extend and you do go into other solution areas or other markets, you've got your platform ready, you've got the services there that can be shared across that platform. There's so many ways when you build that you can be building for scale in the enterprise. I think the one thing that call out here that's most important is that charter customer. When you are ready, when you believe you have something that will help your enterprise customer, go get that customer and get intimately involved with that customer. It's not about the price, it's not about the revenue and the bookings. It's about understanding what the enterprise needs from you. Don't get the biggest giant, get a representative enterprise customer and be honest with them about what you're doing that you're breaking in the market. You believe you can. You believe you can solve their problems and you want to get their input, understand their workflows, understand how they're going to use it, understand what they need from you and your solutions. Give them easy access to testing environments. Let them have information on your roadmap. Let them contribute to your roadmap. No, you're not going to. You're not going to build the blue button that Sean talked about maybe you can negotiate and make the button green though, something that you believe you need to build for everyone. So keeping the words of wisdom that Sean said, get in with these customers, understand what they need, build, get another one, do the same. When you're confident you've got something there, then you can go to the broader enterprise. But learn that customer. Hire the right people. Be intentional about your culture. So cliche. I remember hearing this and sure, of course you hire the right people, right? But this is so important and so meaningful when you are building your company and going into the enterprise. It is a different motion for from where you are in SMB and mid market. And what do we mean by the right customer, the right employees? We mean people who have been there, who have done that, gone from here to here. Right? And really importantly, they want to do it again. They're not too burned out because it's hard. They want to do it again. So they've been there, that done that. The want to do it again. Find those people. They're around. They're walking all around here. Don't settle. You need them. I don't know if you've read the Harvard Business Review article. It's about the organizations that are doing both. They're exploiting what they do well today and they are exploring into the future. It's called the ambidextrous organization. If you get a chance, take a look at it. But boy, this table. But what they say is that you need leaders who have lived both worlds, right? And that know how to straddle both worlds, have empathy in both worlds in order to go move into the future, into the next world. And they need to be talking about it over and over again. And this is what you need to hire. So many mistakes. I can think of so many stories. There isn't just one. But how many times do you watch founders keep people because they're loyal, Keep people because they got them where they are today. You've got to be. I'm not saying change your force, but change your teams. But bring people in who've got this experience. You don't have time to train everyone. You learn a lot when you scale, when you scale one time and move to the enterprise, even that gives you perspective. You want to hire for relationships. Don't hire just for a Rolodex. That's not what this is about. In fact, you don't want to do that. But hire people who have been there, who have established relationships. If they're two candidates and one has a pretty Good network. Take it. And I'll just give you an example. Last week someone I know from two companies ago pinged me and said, hey Julie, I'm at a security startup, a little more than that, security startup. Could you introduce me to your ciso? And I said, sure, looks like a reasonable product. And it went right over the ciso. The CISO looked at it and he goes, yeah, Julie, that looks great. I'll take a look. If I didn't know that guy, I would have went delete. Right? It does help. I mean, the thing is you don't want to over index on the Rolodex because there are so many other things to be looking for. But the trusted relationships are really important. One of the companies building out a partner organization and really hard to get traction with these partners, especially the good ones that are really going to help expedite your growth. Well, the, the partner person we hired knew one of the partners and boom, we got in the door with a partner. The trusted relationships and the networks are incredibly important. And of course you're in verticals like health care and financial services. Hire people with domain experience with the chops. Right vertical. Certain market areas, you gotta find people who've been there, done that, that know the customers. They're the ones that are gonna help you get in there and really make sure your software is going to their problems and satisfy what they need. And of course, not every company going up to the enterprise is going to be global. Most bigger companies do want some global components, do have entities around the world, but hire people who have been there and done that, know what going global means and how to do that, work with different cultures, understand what, what going global means. And then of course, the culture. You've got to vet these people to make sure they align with your values. And once you've done that, they've got the skill set you need, the values that you want them aligned to. Trust them and let them roll. Okay, founders over. As I said, I worked for five companies in my career, all of them founder led. Okay, seen this one a lot, right. The founders again want to hold on and then when they finally do bring someone in, it's hard to let them go. It's hard to let them roll. It doesn't mean you close your eyes and hope it goes well. You got to continually check. You need to make sure your culture is maintained. As a founder, your culture is one of the most important jobs you have. Developing it and maintaining it. Keep it, be relentless about it. The bias on the bottom there beware of bias. Everybody comes in with a bias. I was a CTO and a cpo. Yes. I usually wanted to do things that I felt comfortable with. I was open minded but I knew what my plays were. People come in with playbooks. Be careful of those playbooks. You want them there for experience. But keep checking and make sure they don't bring the playbook to your business. That is not good enough for you. Make sure they're open minded and they're listening and learning your industry and your market and your company and your customers. And then finally here. Know the capabilities that you're going to need when you're up market again. You don't have to build out your company now, but make decisions knowing you're going to get there. Right the biztech right. Got to have the right tools. Right tools for scale, right tools to accommodate those customers and your internal teams for serving those customers. Don't buy things only because they're cheap. Don't buy things only because they're the latest and the greatest. Put time and effort into your portfolio. Be focused on it. Do what your customers do when they're looking at you. Make sure it's the right software for your needs. Don't let it go rampant. And buy five different project management tools. Pick the right one or two that fit your business. Be thoughtful about it because you're going to need that stuff when you scale when you go to market. This one so different. The sales organization needs to be different. You need to move in a different direction. Sales at Enterprise requires someone who's able to understand that sales are going to be lumpy. The deal cycles are elongated. You've got multiple stakeholders and multiple buyers. The procurement process entirely different. You need someone who's going to build relationships and who's committed to understanding the customer's challenges and crafting solutions for those challenges. It is a different sale than the SMB in the mid market. You, you will have a different structure as you move there. It doesn't mean today you need to redo your structure. It means you need to be thinking about it in the people you hire and in the way you're moving and setting up teams to begin going after that market. Partner ecosystem becomes incredibly important as you go up into the enterprise. Start thinking about that now. You don't need hundreds of partners but you need to start getting out there building an ecosystem, getting known, getting connected. And the one on the bottom which I mentioned earlier, contracts and commercials just. You don't need to have a legal team in house, but you need to have maybe a firm that you contract with that gets to know you, maybe it's a contract attorney, but you need to have someone in there who knows how to process these big deals. It's critically important that you negotiate. You need to understand what things are important to you. What do you want to, what do you want to have a conviction about? Where do you draw the line? Know those things when you go into the deals with customers or you will end up giving things away. Even today as a bigger, as a bigger company, we get requests from customers for unlimited or uncapped liability. They want us to do, you know, have our software in escrow and process audits all over. I mean, it's really, really hard. These enterprise customers, again, they've got legal teams and procurement teams, they're professional negotiators and they have a standard contract for all of their vendors and they're going to throw it at you, be able to negotiate, be able to handle what they're going to throw out and know where your lines are drawn. It can be brutal customer success, as Sean talked about. Very, very different in the enterprise. You've got high touch, higher touch, you can ultimately begin charging for signature support. But it's very, very different than on the bottom. The investment that you make in automation is going to pay off true dividends here. Make sure you can onboard and off board successfully and quickly and efficiently. Put the time and investment into that. There was a company I was at and we spent so much time, it wasn't even just the onboarding, but off boarding customers. You leave, think about their data, think about that process and build it in early. It's going to be too late when you get the enterprise customers. Some do churn, right? But be ready to on and off board them, Invest in automation where you can. Again, it's not that I'm saying.

You.

Take your company and you transform it to go to the enterprise. That's not what this is about. It's about the decisions that you make. It's about getting the DNA, it's preparing your team to get there and you gotta be thinking about it and, and minimizing the challenges along the way will help you. Because no matter what you do, plan or not, it's still very, very challenging when you get there. But the payoff of course is worth it. I mean, no place I'd rather be than in the enterprise. And when you get those reference customers, they just keep going and they just keep growing and I'm going to call Sean back up. Hello? Okay, takeaways you had a few.

Yes. So we have a few. Well, as I mentioned before, it's like a football analogy. You need to orchestrate plays with your company and the potential customer and then also don't create a custom product for any company.

All right. Mine are be intentional with direction. Talk about it. Draw pictures, show graphs where you want to be 1, 2, 3 years from now, 4 years from now, whatever it takes to get into the enterprise, talk about it and bring in the right people with the right skills and the relevant experience to help you get there. The fastest way to move. Remember, it is a team sport. Prepare your entire organization. Next, get that enterprise customer in the door and go slay the dragon. Do what you need to to figure out how you're going to align, how you can sync up your roadmaps and figure out what they need from you to be the best provider, to be a differentiated provider so you can be successful with not just them, but all the other customers as well that you want to bring into the enterprise. And finally, the ultimate that the balance of winning today is going to be on you every minute of every day to get those numbers to meet your targets today, quarter after quarter. Got to balance that out with the vision of where you're going tomorrow and decision making for where you want to be. Great.

We have time for two or three questions if you want to come up to the mic if you have any. I have two quick questions. Sean, did you have Google Glass in that failure museum by chance? I do. Okay. And actually that's an example of something that was donated to me by someone that worked at Google. So I'm open for donations if you have something. And Julie, you spoke about procurement, wanted to just get any advice on finding internal champions as you're meeting with customers, particularly in the enterprise space.

Internal champions within, within prospecting. Customers just pay attention to procurement. Right? They, they want to be valued, they want to bring value. Don't discard them, don't think they're a rubber stamp, don't think there's something to deal with later. Bring them in as you're working with them. That's a critical point. I've seen that so many times where when procurement doesn't feel valued, they're going to come after you. They're going to be relentless. When you are a friend of procurement, go in and make those relationships work. And you'll need them over. The important thing is you'll need them over and over and over again when you come back to renew contracts, when you come back to sell more and you expand, make. They are every bit as important as your economic buyer. That is a really important question. They are really important into your success in a company.

Hi Julie, I was part of the original sales team at Salesforce that sold around it at first and then I was part of the team that then had to go clean up all those relationships. So everything you're saying is exactly right. I felt it. The question I want to ask you is you talked about trusted relationships and how critical they are as you're moving up to the enterprise. Do you have any tips, tricks, ideas on how to leverage those, how to find those, how to scale those, how do you use those across the entire company?

I have so many tips on how to communicate and get in and build with relationships. It would be a topic way larger this and could be one that's on its own. In fact, I've talked about it at CKO kickoffs before on how to build those trusted relationships with your economic buyers and procurement too. But it really is, it's human. It's human buying. I was a CIO also and when account managers came in and think of me as a person and really aligned with who I was and thought about where I am in the organization and they're worried about me and how I roll internally, we should talk offline. There's so many things you can do to build those strong relations and that's what it's all about. That truly is. I mean account account sellers in the. In the enterprise and strategic accounts understand that and when you go higher, find people like that because relationships are what it's all about.

I have a question on allocating product and dev resources. Do you find it common or a good idea to have let's say your pod of product managers and developers and segment them to say you're going to be focused on enterprise pursuits and a SMB mid market.

You're going to.

You'll be focused on those needs, hopefully not building anything too custom obviously. But still, do you find that's typical to split them out or try and maintain some nebulous group of PMs and devs to do both markets?

You want me to.

That's good for you.

Yes. You segment them out, right? Always when you're working on a new product, when you're working on growth solutions, you segment them out. You want to again communicate to the rest of the company what's going on. But yes, that earlier example I gave you in the room, we had a group of people working on enterprise account. You're going to take A team maybe and turn them into the enterprise for sales and you're going to talk about it and some of your sellers will go there and some you'll acquire from outside. But yes, but it's about the whole company understanding where you're going. But yeah, you have to segment because you've got to worry about today. Remember the final point there, the balance of today and crushing it because you have to crush it today and going into the future and being prepared. I mean that's the hardest part about it.

Yeah. And I think more from the go to market standpoint and you obviously need to segment out on the enterprise. I'm a big believer in hiring in pairs. So hire your first two enterprise reps in pairs. If they both do well then it's time to hire more. If one does well and one doesn't, it's probably performance related. If they both don't do well, maybe you're not ready to sell to the enterprise.

Thanks Julie. Thanks for the insights. Quick question. We are still a bit early but we have plans to get into the enterprise. We've had some conversations but it could be a time suck when you're early and so is the idea like how do you determine when it's a good time to start to build and sell into the the enterprise? Especially when you have some mid market customers. I feel like there's a lot of learnings if you start early and start to bake in those requirements into your product and the process and you learn. But how early do you start?

You want to start?

Sure. I mean I usually people start selling to departments and geographies with the enterprise and from there you can expand and then get a much larger account. I think you, you can never start too early. I think some of the problems I see is people start too small and you start too small. You see a lot of churn down market because of the health of those customers and then those are very needy. They need a lot of hand holding to be successful. It's hard to be profitable downmarket. I'd rather move up market more quickly and take your chances. And, and you don't have to get that large whale of a win. Just get some logos and help that create some velocity for you. Yeah, perfect.

Thanks.

One question, in your opinion, what is.

The minimum annual contract value that you will consider enterprise?

I mean I care more about the logo than exactly the acv. Any dollar amount from an enterprise. It's more than just the money they're spending. It's the time and investment in making this Successful in any enterprise even if they write a 25 or 50k check. The goal most likely is this becomes a much bigger deal over time. I've seen people land one of my portfolio companies, they landed with a 25k ACV deal and that customer's now paying them over a million a year.

This is what I was saying earlier about the logos. You can get a multi billion dollar customer and get their logo but you're selling $20,000 into one department. That's not really being in the enterprise. Right. It's selling your SMB or mid market into an enterprise customer. But it's not what we're talking, we're talking about being successful in the enterprise, growing through the enterprise and then growing with you and willing to expand. So very, very different. But starting early on when you feel they are seeing something that they want and you can respond and give them that go. It's time.

We have less than a minute. So one quick question. The one question I have is if you are selling into the enterprise, is there any techniques to make it more like a toothpaste selling toothpaste?

I've never sold toothpaste. Have you Sean?

Simplify.

Right?

Yeah. I mean I think it's, I think it's easier when you're selling to the department or geography where maybe a lower level decision making to make a decision on a smaller deal size. But you know, once it becomes like you know, hundreds of thousands or millions acv, I mean it's, it's very complex. A lot of decision makers, a lot of processes, procurement gets involved.

But yes there are, I mean when you get up, when you get up market you have, there are enterprise sales techniques, there are books, information, everything. It is a whole different play. That's why it's so important to hire someone who's been there. Hire sales leaders that have been in the enterprise, hire people that have had that experience because yes, it's a play. Being in the enterprise is different. So you do everything you can to make it easy and simple for those sellers to conquer the beast and go get the win.

Well, thanks for joining us today. Appreciate it.

Thank you very much.